On machinic life and utopian fantasy - cartesian meditations on science/fiction topologies

Saturday, October 19, 2013

What Swift Has to Teach Us About Digitized Mind and Text Machines (III)

Swift's speculative learning machine
is a fictional mechanical device for automatic text generation. The
purpose of the machine it to “write books in philosophy, poetry,
politics, law, mathematics, and theology, etc.” Swift wrote about
it in his Gulliver's Travels.

The
novel came into existence in the general cultural context of suspicion towards the emerging world of machines in the XVIII
century. Swift was no exception. In the end, it is the
very business of the intellectual
to doubt, not to take things on their face value. “Perhaps
you
might wonder to see me
employed in a project for improving speculative knowledge, by
practical and mechanical operations”,
says the inventor of the
machine, professor of the fictional Lagado Academy. Swift
was essentially
doubting about the possibility to acquire knowledge by purely
mechanical means.

Philosophy
– spirit VS flesh

Why?
For philosophers, at least from Plato on, knowledge always
represented the highest and finest achievement of the human spirit.
What is more, the very essence of the human mind was seen to consist
in knowing. The knowledge
itself was conceptualized as theoria
–looking at things
with the mind's eye. Now, the Latin word for Greek theoria
is speculatio. The word “speculative” literally means “to look, to see, to
gaze, to stare”. But in the philosophical jargon it designates the
looking activity divorced from the sensual (perception). So, the
speculation can be described as an intellectual looking
at things. In addition, it is looking at intellectual
things, things that do not exist
in space and time, things
like God, numbers, the idea of justice, etc.

Every
machine is a mechanical device. And every mechanical device is made
of some material. So, the machine is a material device. Simply put,
it means that it exists as a concrete individual thing.It occupies someposition in
space and time. But the essence of spirituality resides in the
intellectuality: intellectual speculation of intellectual things.
Being material,
machine must be opposed to the spirituality. Where there is machine,
there is no spirit, and vice versa.

That
is why the professor, inventor of the machine says to Gulliver:
“Perhaps you
might wonder to see me
employed in a project for improving speculative knowledge, by
practical and mechanical operations.”
Knowledge is something theoretical and not practical. Knowledge is
something spiritual and not mechanical.

Descartes
– mind VS body-machine

But
there is more to it. And in order to understand why we have to go
back to Descartes (XVII century). He
is the one who redefined the old Christian problem of flesh VS spirit
into a more modern one. That of the body VS mind. What is absolutely new
in the historical sense is that he defined the flesh as mechanism.
So, body is a flesh became mechanical. Being mechanical now explains
what it means to be material.

Descartes'
philosophy is known as dualism. That means that there are only
two kinds of things in the universe. And for Descartes everything was
either a mind or a body, but not both. So, the spirit could never be
material and body could never be spiritual. Corollary: there is no such
thing as a spiritual machine.

Cartesian
method

The history is very ironic. And philosophy is no exception to that.
Because the very essence of the Cartesian method – Descartes Latin
name was Cartesius – made possible reflexion on thinking machines.
Descartes was philosophically engaged in finding the perfect
scientific method. The idea was simple. We all have the common sense
that tells us perfectly what is true and what isn't. The only problem
is that we do not use it well.
So, let's find a method that would be trivially easy to apply, so
that even a man with humble intellectual capacities could use it
to find the truths.
All of them. Even the most
profound ones. The point is, with a method, whose workings
consist in application of simple discrete steps one has to be no
genius in order to find out even the most complicated truths.

The
only thing one has to have is a patience and a concentrated mind. That means that
the study is nevertheless required on the part of the prospective
scholar.

Speculative
learning machine

But
wait! If even the man with no genius at all could solve the difficult
intellectual problems by making easy to follow simple
discrete steps why wouldn't it be possible for
the machine too? You just have to construct a machine that can reproduce these Cartesian method-like steps. And that is exactly what Swift's speculative
learning machine does.

It even pushes Descartes' idea one step
further. Because not only one doesn't
have to be a genius in order to write books in philosophy, poetry,
etc. but also the
usage of his machine dispenses one from the “study”. Only thing
required is a little bodily labor to push and pull levers driving the
machine. The machine itself applies the rules of the method and
outputs truths in the form of the string of letters.

There
is a strong analogy here between the tool-machine and mind-machine
relationship. The tool
demands the skill and labor on the part of the artisan. The machine
dispenses the worker from both. Now it is the
machine which
skillfully handles tools. Man does not have to work, except for the
“little bodily effort” needed to operate the machine. In the case
of our speculative learning machine, the machine is doing the
thinking, the truth discovery. It is gathering the knowledge
for us. We do not need to be genius in order to use it. But we don't
need either to indulge ourselves in a tedious and long study. We just
need to put a “little bodily effort” in order to operate the
machine.

Looking
forward to the spiritual machines

The
speculative learning machine was never made. Nevertheless, we made
lot of thinking machines. Thinking in the sense of the
application of simple
discrete rules that are finite in number. Those machines are
computers and their thinking is called “algorithmic problem
solving”. So, at least in this sense some
machines of
our age do speculate.

In the
next article we will go one step further. We will talk not only about
machines that think, but also about machines
that are longing to be spiritual. We will analyze android's quest for
religion
as it is
described by Phillip K. Dick in his novel Do Androids Dream
of Electric Sheep.

No comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe To

About Me

Hello, I am a philosopher of Yugoslavian origin. In my
research I'm trying to untie the borromean knot of ontology, science and
politics. I am also an amateur hacker and a video game/science fiction
aficionado.

I currently live and work in Lausanne, Switzerland, where I write my PhD
thesis L'idée de machine et d'automate dans la philosophie de René
Descartes.